Ludiquest 2 - Last chance!

I am posting the Ludiquest puzzle one last time. Whoever sends the proper one-word answer to the correct e-mail address will win a new copy of Vegas Showdown or Hollywood Blockbuster (your choice). The puzzle has several steps and you will learn the e-mail address as you progress through the puzzle. I know at least one person has gotten extremely close to solving it. The hints I've previously revealed are included below the puzzle and I've added a new one. If this isn't solved by Saturday, I'll start revealing steps until someone gets it. Good luck!

With Roman count "as 102"

You’ll read the writing on the wall,

But you will need to change your view

Before you make the proper call.

57 76 57 48 57 55 57 57 57 56

Hints:

Where does c = 100?

Where does 1000001 = 65 = A?

When does pi = 180?

Where does L = 5?

The last word will be found by location, not by sound

Quick Update

I'm impatient to retire the the Ludiquest so someone needs to solve it. I'll do one last post of it and try to link it in new places to get some new eyes to look at it and someone to solve it. If that doesn't work, I'll post pieces of the solution until someone gets it. After this, I won't be posting new Ludiquests unless I can figure out some way to structure them so they wrap up more quickly. Instead, I will post a game review every Monday morning, beginning with Fairy Tale this coming Monday.

Games played this week: The Bucket King, Ra, Shogun, Fairy Tale, St. Peterburg, California, Battlelore (x2). Shogun and BattleLore were both new to me and both were pretty good. I will definitely have to try both of them again. Game count is now at 63.

Game's I've played since Saturday, etc.

It's been a furious few days of boardgaming. I've played Aqueduct, Nottingham (x2), Pit, Fairy Tale (x2), Vegas Showdown, Saga and Tongiaki. This brings me to 55 games for the year.

Inspired by a challenge on Brenda Brathwaite's web site, I was struck by an idea for a card game about assembling adventuring parties and matching their skills to dungeons/quests. Also, yesterday I practically completed a design for a new card-drafting game. When I will have time to develop these, I have no idea.

I did finally complete the newest prototype of Cattle Baron and got the chance to test it. It seemed to be a fair improvement, but I feel like the final few fence placements are anticlimactic since the board is usually too cluttered for them to be useful. I need to experiment with a few possible approaches to fix this.

Oops, has it been a month already?

I’ve been a bad blogger again. It’s been almost a month without a post and that’s no good. Work has been pretty busy, but really it’s just my lack of discipline. I think I’ve put myself in the mindset that I need something “important” enough to write about, but that’s not really the right mentality for a blog. So, I’ve written myself a little list of fun or interesting (hopefully) things that have happened over the last month, and I’ll be making several posts over the next week.

By my count, I’ve only played 10 boardgames since I last posted, so my 2008 game count is woefully behind the pace at 45. I don’t have my list with me, but some of the games I can recall playing recently were California (x3), Starcraft the board game, Mystery of the Abbey, Race for the Galaxy, Ra, and Ticket to Ride.

I now have a fancy video card to go with my new PC and 22” LCD monitor, so I’ve been spending more time on PC games over the last month. I expect to add some PC/video game posts in the future.

Finally, Ludiquest 2 still hasn’t been fully solved and I intend to remedy that in one way or another. I intend to try to get more people to attempt it. If that doesn’t work, I’ll just start revealing how it is solved step by step until someone finds the answer. Still up for grabs is a copy of Vegas Showdown to the winner.

Design: CivDice

Although Cattle Baron is the boardgame design I've made my priority, I have several other game ideas that I hopefully will have time to work on this year. Of these, I am most excited about a design with a working title of CivDice that I came up with around April of last year. I actually went so far as to blog a few entries about it on the Board Game Designer's Forum (where I called it Civilia).

I chose to prioritize Cattle Baron as my goal, because CivDice is much more involved and is going to take a lot of playtesting and tweaking to get right. However, I thought it might be fun to share some of the ideas that make up this design.

After being inspired by this post by Shannon Appelcline on the now-extinct Gone Gaming blog, my goal was to create a boardgame that simulated building a civilization and having your empire compete against those of other players. The primary constraints were that this game would have systems for expanding your empire, advancing your technology, trade, and warfare and be playable in two hours or less. This is a major challenge and I'll be happy if I can even come close.

Not surprisingly, CivDice features lots of dice. I certainly understand that dice have a poor reputation among eurogamers, but I'm hoping I'll be able to use them here without creating a game that rests primarily on luck. I'm of the opinion that by using medium-sized pools of dice, plenty of choices for how to use them and sufficient methods of altering dice rolls, the luck will be cut down to acceptable levels.

Players will roll dice equal to the current population of their civ, and the dice must be spent in order to move, attack, collect resources, or acquire resources, buildings, or advisors. Player's dice will be public knowledge and players will take turns spending them, so the order in which you do things will be important when competing for items.

One of the wrinkles I'm trying to include is to dovetail the dice mechanic neatly into manuevering on the map. The map will be a tiling of equilateral triangles, with cities and units resting at intersecting points. This means that from any location (that is not on the edge of the board), there are six neigboring triangles (some or all of which contain resources) and six adjacent places to move. Of course, there are also six sides on a standard die to make this a perfect way to generate player options.

Other new twists I plan to add involve the technology tree. Other than the default method of eliminating all other players (which will be very difficult in most cases), all victory conditions or means to earn victory points will be acquired through advanced technology upgrades. You won't even know what you need to do to win until you've advanced a bit along the tech tree. I am also planning a simple system for technologies to have general requirements, while not locking players into a set advancement path.

As a side note, I played a few games last night (Fairy Tale, Vegas Showdown, Pillars of the Earth) to bring the game count to 35. Also, I'm planning to make my more durable Cattle Baron prototype this weekend.

Third and Fourth Life?

By now almost anyone with any technical savvy has heard of Second Life. For the few who haven’t, Second Life is a virtual online world. Unlike just about every other virtual online world, the makers of Second Life don’t provide content for you to collect, kill, race, destroy or otherwise interact with. What they do provide are tools for you to make your own content and a virtual currency so you can buy/sell it from/to other users. This currency can be traded for real U.S. dollars on their custom exchange so that developers can actually profit from their creations.

Second Life is pretty amazing and has received plenty of recognition as “the next big thing”, but I’ve always felt there were a few things holding it back from widespread acceptance. First is a heavy bandwidth requirement – pages load slowly just because that many 3-D objects are enough to clog up most users’ networks. Second, 3-D creation tools are complicated enough to stump the average user. And finally, new users need to download a client just for this purpose. Eventually, I thought at one time, the technology will catch up enough to eliminate the first two as issues (and the third one isn’t that big) and Second Life will supplant the World Wide Web. Although that "eventually" seemed to be a ways off.

However, two new software projects are underway that might change all that: Whirled and MetaPlace. Both of them allow users to create their own content. Both plan to have their own currency that can be exchanged for real currency. Most importantly, both of them are web-based. Most web-based content is more segregated, and smaller, so bandwidth should no longer be an issue. Web-based content is generally much easier to create than 3-D content, so the learning curve of the editing tools is far less of a barrier. Finally, all content can be accessed by anyone who has a web browser (meaning everyone) with no additional client download and can presumably can use links to and be linked from existing web pages.

Both projects are currently in Alpha. I think whichever gets to market first will have a huge edge in becoming widely adopted. I could also imagine either or both being adopted/bought/merged with one of the major social networking sites. It will be interesting to see what happens.

Conquer Club

Frankly, I’m not a huge fan of Risk. In my younger days I used to think it was an excellent game, but after I was exposed to eurogames, its flaws become more evident. Now that I know better, I would say the game has the flaws of having player elimination, too much downtime, far too much luck, and overly dominant strategies (take Australia and hold). Despite this, I will always have a certain fondness for the game because of the enjoyable times I’ve had playing it.

Last night, I ran into an ad for a web site called conquerclub.com. While they never actually mention Risk (for legal reasons, I’m sure), let’s just say that they provide the ability to play a game very similar to Risk for free online. I think online play is a great match for Risk, because it mitigates key flaws in the game. I no longer mind player elimination since I don’t have to sit and watch, and I don’t mind the typical downtime for the same reason. In addition to this, they have different boards you can try and some rule variants that would be difficult to implement in a face-to-face game. Most games require you to move once per day (although if you don’t, your bonus armies will carry over to the next turn).

Last night I signed up for my first game, which differs from the regular game in two key ways: there is no set turn order, and the fog of war is enforced in the game. The lack of turn order is primarily to reduce wait time, but could still affect player strategy. My first thought is to wonder if players sometimes string two turns together (by moving at the end of one turn, and the beginning of the next) in order to blitzkrieg a position. Adding a fog of war, however, is something I expect will change the entire dynamic of the game. Not knowing the state of the rest of the map adds a huge uncertainty to any large-scale plans you might hope to carry out on your turn. Bottling yourself up in Australia is no longer nearly as attractive if it means you’re unaware of the world scene; and taking one country away from an opponent to prevent them from gaining a continent bonus is no longer obvious if you’re not sure who holds the other side of the continent. It adds a whole new reason to stage an attack – for information. I’m definitely looking forward to seeing how this might add new life to the game.

In fact, just for fun I'm throwing down the electronic gauntlet - I have just created a new game (#1719311). Join if you dare. I'll see you on the battlefield.

"I'm not dead yet"

It’s been ten days since my last post. That makes me a bad blogger and means I’ve rather quickly failed out on one of my gaming resolutions, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to abandon it. I’ll just have to jump back on the blogging wagon and try harder this week. I’ll start back with a quick update of what’s been going on.

I had a party on Jan. 19th, and several party games were played which I can add to the game count: Lost Cities x 2, Snorta x 2, Scene It, Transamerica and the Bucket King. The new game count is 32.

Last Saturday (Jan 26th) I managed to rope a couple of friends into trying out the simple “Cattle Baron” prototype. The comments about the gameplay were encouraging and the game seemed to work well. However, the comments about the quality of the prototype were not very positive. I can’t really disagree – placing paper fence pieces on paper tile pieces lends itself to quite a bit of sliding around. My next order of business on this project is to fabricate a prototype that is a little more robust. Afterwards, we got in a game of Ticket to Ride: game count 33.

I broke down and bought Rock Band over the weekend. It’s very hard to find it for the PS2 and I saw two copies when I was walking through Best Buy. As expected, it’s a very addictive time-waster and probably has a bit to do with my dearth of posts.

Ludiquest 2 solved...mostly

Someone sent me an answer early this morning, but it was incomplete. I thought they should recheck their work, and then I decided perhaps I should recheck mine. Sadly, I found one of the numbers was wrong and this would stop players from moving onto the next phase. So, since the person who emailed me answered as far as the error would allow, I am giving them the prize. I still want people to get to the end, so I will put up a second prize for anyone who finds the final answer. That prize will be a shrink-wrapped copy of Hollywood Blockbuster. I've corrected the last number in the sequence below to be 56 and I apologize for the error. Play on!

With Roman count "as 102"
You’ll read the writing on the wall,
But you will need to change your view
Before you make the proper call.

57 76 57 48 57 55 57 57 57 56

Where does c = 100?

Where does 1000001 = 65 = A?

When does pi = 180?

Where does L = 5?

*This number changed from 54

LudiQuest 2 Hints

So it's been two weeks and no one has solved the LudiQuest. In fact, no one has even gotten far enough to see the next clue. I guess it's harder than I thought. So below I have added some hints. The hints are questions themselves, but not terribly difficult ones. They should be enough to guide you through the steps you need to solve the puzzle. Good luck!

With Roman count "as 102"
You’ll read the writing on the wall,
But you will need to change your view
Before you make the proper call.

57 76 57 48 57 55 57 57 57 56*

Where does c = 100?

Where does 1000001 = 65 = A?

When does pi = 180?

Where does L = 5?

*Corrected last number in sequence from 54 to 56.

Design in Progress: “Cattle Baron”

Previously I mentioned that one of my New Years’ resolutions is to develop one of my own game ideas sufficiently that I’m comfortable submitting it to a publisher. While I have a few different options for ideas I’d like to limit it to one that is relatively simple (to make sure I have enough time to do it right), cheap to produce (since I think a publisher might not want to take a big risk on a new designer), and promising. Based on these criteria, I have culled out one of my more recent ideas and I will be concentrating on it.

The concept involves using both tile-laying and area enclosure, in order to create area majorities. The best analogy I could come up with to explain the gameplay (and therefore my choice for the working theme) is that of cattle ranchers fencing off different parts of a pasture in order to gain possession of the most cows (all the cows within an enclosure are scored by you if you have the most). There will be a limited amount of pasture tiles and fences which either player may place in turn. Different types of cattle will appear on the pasture tiles with each player being trying to create fields that have majorities of that type. The game will likely be two-player only. My working title is “Cattle Baron”, although I also like “Don’t Fence Me In”.

I created a very simple prototype a couple of weeks ago and tried playing against myself to see where it went. While there was some gameplay there, the tactics were more limited than I had hoped. You could both find scoring opportunities and respond to your opponent, but trying to defend against what your opponent might do was quite difficult. Recently, I’ve created a new prototype which I have yet to test. I’ve changed the configuration of the fields in order to make placing fences a little more difficult and I’ve added “neutral cows” that add to scoring, but don’t help make majorities for either player. I’m hoping these changes add to the tactical possibilities.


New Hints: Additional (and more substantial) LudiQuest 2 hints will be posted tomorrow.

Two more games played last night (Evo, Unspeakable Words) brings my game count to 25.

Ra Review

Ra is by now a classic eurogame, but it’s relatively new to me. It’s also the prize in this month’s LudiQuest and it seems only fair to let people know what they’re trying to win by way of this review. Ra is a game for three to five players, was designed by Reiner Knizia, and most recently published by Uberplay.

The gameplay in Ra centers around gathering a variety of scoring tiles in order to garner the most points in the game’s three scoring rounds (or “kingdoms”). At the beginning of the game, players each receive three “sun tiles” (or four, in a three-player game) which will be used to bid on tiles in order to gain victory points (technically called “fame”, I think). The tiles are numbered one through thirteen (or up to sixteen, with five players) with the tile numbered one starting in the middle of the board.

On each player’s turn, they can do one of two things: Take a tile from the bag or call for an auction. If they take a tile from the bag, they generally add that tile to the group of things which will later be auctioned. The only exception to this is that if they draw a “Ra” tile, which instead forces an auction to be called immediately. When an auction is called, the person who initiated the auction (by calling it intentionally, or by drawing a Ra tile) bids last, with each player bidding once only. You may only use one of your sun tiles to bid with, so there are only three possible bid values (plus zero for a pass). If a player started an auction intentionally, they must bid if everyone else passes. When someone wins an auction, they take all the tiles and the sun tile in the middle (which cannot be used until after the next scoring) and put the tile they bid onto the board to become part of the next auction. The scoring round ends when a certain number of Ra tiles are drawn. The gameplay itself is very simple – there are few kinds of decisions to make and each one has very few choices. When learning the game, the more daunting task is keeping track of the many different types of tiles and how they work to add (or subtract from) your score.

Gold tiles are the simplest, giving a player three points during scoring and then being removed from the game. It is important to get at least one Civilization tile each round, because you lose five points during scoring if you have none (you start the game with a score of ten). Getting positive points with them requires you to acquire at least three different types before they are removed at the end of the scoring round. Pharoahs score five points each round for the player who has the most, while the player who has the least loses two points. You keep pharaoh tiles until the end of the game. Land is another tile type you get to hold onto, but they don’t score anything without having at least one flood tile (which goes away after scoring). As long as you have a flood, all lands and floods score a point apiece. Monuments don’t score until the third and final round of the game, but can be worth a massive amount of points if you have a lot of them. You score is based on both how many types of the 12 you’ve collected and on how many sets of three or more (bigger sets are worth more) you’ve collected. God tiles can be expended to allow a player to steal a tile from the “tableau”. If you do so, this is the only action you take on your turn. If you don’t do so, you’ll instead turn them in for two points during scoring. Finally, there are disaster tiles. Disaster tiles score no points – acquiring one means you have to remove two tiles you already own. Disasters affect pharaohs, civilizations, lands (and floods), or monuments, depending on the type.

The strategy in Ra centers around 1) how much groupings of tiles are worth to various people and 2) when to call an auction. By calling an auction to exploit a gap in the values of others’ tiles, you can often pick up a bargain.

Overall, Ra is a light game with quite a bit of luck. You can manage this luck to a certain degree by choosing whether or not to play “press your luck” at the end of a scoring round by gambling on how many valuable tiles might come out before the next Ra tile ends the round.
It moves quickly (once you learn the tiles) and has very little downtime. Based on these factors, I will rate it a 7.5 out of 10.


P.S. I got in some games on Saturday morning and increased my 2008 game count by six to 23(Pillars of the Earth, Clans x2, Evo, 24/7 x2)

LudiQuest II Hint

No one has solved the LudiQuest yet, so it's time for a hint. This is a small one. The puzzle is repeated below, albeit with a small addition (your hint). Good luck. If no one has solved it around this time next week, there will be a bigger hint.

With Roman count "as 102"
You'll read the writing on the wall,
But you will need to change your view
Before you make the proper call.*

57 76 57 48 57 55 57 57 57 56*

*Corrected last number in sequence from 54 to 56.

Hint coming; new games played

No one has solved LudiQuest #2 yet (or even made it to the next section), so I’m posting a small hint tomorrow. If need be, I have more hints ready to post next weekend also.

Last night I got a chance to play two new games: Thebes and Race for the Galaxy. That brings the 2008 game count up to 17.

I’m just polishing up the Ra review; it will be up later today.

New Year’s gaming resolutions

So far this year I’ve played 14 boardgames.* That’s a much faster rate than is typical for me and bodes well for plenty of gaming goodness in 2008. I want to make sure I keep up that trend and so keeping up with tradition, I’m making some 2008 gaming resolutions.

1. Play the equivalent of a game a day: I’ve got a head start, so maybe I can actually get 366 (it’s a leap year) games in this year. I’m certainly going to try. I'll track my progress on this blog.

2. Finish a game prototype and get it polished enough to submit it to a publisher. I have plenty of game ideas. I even prototype some of them and bug my friends to play them. This year I resolve to keep my attention on one for long enough to make something out of it.

3. Post at least three blog entries a week. ‘Nuff said.

Just before the year started, I also played a couple of games of Ra. This brings my count up to five, which I think is enough to write a reasonable review. I’ll be posting it within the next couple of days.

* Games played: Bohnanza, Fearsome Floors, True Colors, Quoridor, 99 (card game), Pirate’s Cove, Vegas Showdown, Pitchcar, Fairy Tale, Zooloretto (x2), Phoenicia (x2), Buy Low Sell High

Portal

I’ve primarily discussed board games here and I expect that to be a common topic, but I don’t intend for that to be my only topic. I want to discuss games and game-like activities in all forms, especially when they’re new and intriguing like Portal.

I received “The Orange Box” as a Christmas present and over the weekend I tried the new Valve game Portal. The game has the standard controls of a first-person shooter, but instead of shooting enemies you are in a testing area with certain objectives to complete.

All of the gameplay derives from one new concept: imagine you had a gun that could shoot portals. More specifically, imagine you had a gun that could create either side of a portal at a distance. You can only have one portal open at a time and you must create both sides of the portal to use it, but you can move either end of your very own wormhole almost at will by shooting somewhere else. For convenience, the game differentiates the sides of the portal by color (orange and blue) and each mouse button shoots a different color.

All of the objectives would be impossible without the portal gun, but many are quite easy with its use. For instance, if I need to get across a pit of deadly radioactive waste, I can just create a portal next to me, then place the exit across the pit and step through. There are instances where you must retrieve crates and place them on floor switches or get a bouncing energy ball (whose touch would be fatal) to go to a certain place or traverse a course filled with stationary (but armed) battle androids or use a combination of portals and gravity to propel yourself over barriers. The puzzles contained in each level’s physical layout are clever and force you to explore the new possibilities.

It’s surprising how disorienting the portal can be. When you first look through a portal and see yourself from another angle, your brain tells you that person couldn’t possibly be you (especially since, odds are, your portal avatar looks nothing like you). It gets even worse when you're falling through portals with different orientations (like one the wall and one on the ceiling). I guess travelling through a tear in the spacetime continuum is bound to cause some vertigo, at least.

Initially there doesn't appear to be any story at all as you progress through the game, just a series of "testing rooms" with excellent puzzles. You are often given instructions or commentary from the AI adminstering the test. The comments by the AI are often funny and sometimes a bit creepy. They set the narrative that you'll play out at the end of the game and keep you entertained along the way. The last level contains most of the story, and is one my most enjoyable gaming experiences in quite a while.

It's definitely shorter than most computer/video games that come out today. I liked this, since it meant I actually had time to finish it. There are bonus levels and harder versions of the original maps for those who are looking for more to do. More to the point, the ending of the game was great and I will remember it for years to come. I'd recommend this to anyone who owns a PC. If you don't want to buy the entire Orange Box package, you can download the game individually from Steam for $20.

LudiQuest II

Ok, so it’s time for the next contest. I’ve given it a new, shiny (if slightly goofy) name. I'm sorry to say I had to make a last minute change due to a "technical difficulty", but I think it will still be quite interesting. I had a few goals in mind when coming up with this contest, and I’d like to share them with you.

i. I want to make the contest difficult enough that no one will solve it on the first day. I don’t want this to be a case where within hours of posting the puzzle it’s been solved, and most people are out of contention before they’ve even read it. Optimally, I’d like it to be a week or more before someone wins. If I eventually need to dole out pieces to make this work, I will – but for now it is solvable pretty much as soon as it’s posted.

ii. I don’t want the puzzle to require advanced mathematics or dedicated computing power to solve. While it might require a bit of ciphering, I’d much rather a few "Aha!" moments are enough to do the trick.
iii. I want the contest to be completely free to play (apart from having certain ubiquitous services, like the one allowing you to read this web page).

iv. I want their to be the possibility that you’ll learn something new while solving it.

v. I want the puzzle to be fun!


So those are my goals – we’ll see how thing play out. Keep #3 in mind – this puzzle is free, and knowing that might help you avoid a certain path. The prize, as previously announced, is a new copy of the game Ra. Once again, you’ll be told where to send your answer. Have patience, be persistent, and good luck. Here it is:

With Roman count as 102
You'll read the writing on the wall,
But you will need to change your view
Before you make the proper call.*

57 76 57 48 57 55 57 57 57 56*

*rhyme slightly revised to make it more clear

*Corrected last number in sequence from 54 to 56.